Research firm Strategy Analytics has announced its smartphone market share numbers for Q3 2012. The numbers show that Samsung Galaxy S III overtook the Apple iPhone 4S to become the world's best selling smartphone for Q3.

Samsung shipped 18 million Galaxy S III smartphones during Q3 of 2012. The quantity of units shipped gave Samsung's smart phone 11% of the smartphone market globally. Strategy Analytics attributes the Galaxy S III's large touchscreen and extensive distribution around the world along with generous operator subsidies as the main reasons for the smartphones success.

Apple shipped 16.2 million iPhone 4S smartphones, giving it second place in the global smartphone market. Much of the reason that the iPhone slipped from the top spot was because consumers were holding off to purchase the anticipated iPhone 5 at the end of Q3. Apple shipped 6 million units of the iPhone 5 in Q3 of 2012 with very little time on market.

The total number of smartphones shipped in Q3 of 2012 added up to 167.8 million.

The Samsung Galaxy S III grew its market share significantly between Q2 of 2012 and Q3 growing from 3.5% to 10.7% of the global market. Comparatively, the iPhone 4S slipped from 12.7% of the market in Q2 of 2012 to 9.7%. The brand-new iPhone 5 grabbed 3.6% of the market.

However, the research firm expects the win for Samsung to be very short-lived. Strategy Analytics says that it expects the iPhone 5 to out ship the Galaxy S III in Q4 2012 allowing the iPhone to regain the title as the world's most popular smartphone.

Ad hominem attacks against objective facts certainly says that you're mad. Why else would you jump on people to defend inferior things with no backup other than name-calling? You have nothing else to help yourself other than that.

If your facts were objective you would have mentioned the removable battery, the larger screen, the hi res screen, micro sd, NFC, and a far superior OS and all the other things the S3 has that the iPhone lacks.

it is good hardware although very undersized. But really the OS is just getting old. IOS6 should really be called IOS 3.4

The high res screen isn't much of an improvement when it is a pentile screen with fewer subpixels than a "lower" res display in an iPhone, thus resulting in visual artifacts and fuzzy looking text. Ditto goes for their poor color calibration, oversaturated, too much contrast, and inconsistent between phones. With the premium they charge you'd think that they could individually color calibrate those displays and get them to sRGB.

Removable batteries and SD cards are nice, but with those you add size. There is no way to get those features into something as small as an iPhone, and its the same reason why the Nexus 7 and Kindle don't have those either. My first generation Kindle had expandable battery and SD card expansion. You know what, taking them away and making the device smaller was well worth the trade, and the same applies here. They are just not valuable to me, making the device smaller is, but I understand if other people want to compromise size for physical expansion. I never carried spare batteries with my laptops or phones before all this, I went for products with the best battery life instead. Carrying around more crap isn't for me.

I think its a dead end feature in the long run since battery life and storage will continue to increase as size decreases. An iPhone also gets you double the LTE browsing time and almost double the wifi browsing time of an S3, so no need to carry around spare batteries in the first place.

As for the OS getting old, my main complaints are skeumorphism in certain apps (calendar, podcasts), but Ive taking over software UI should fix those very quickly. Otherwise it has a solid feature set and is by far the most efficient OS out there. Efficiency is one reason why it squeezes faster application performance with SoCs clocked 30% slower. Under the hood it is still a beast, so I'm fine with it. Being the #1 target development platform also helps with my decision.

Again, these are reasons why I currently use it. If larger screens or physical keyboards matter then I totally understand why you'd get another device, those are totally legit.